Promoting the life and legacy of Rachel Carson, 5/27/1907 - 4/14/1964. Fostering a culture of Sentinel Lions who share Rachel's ethics and values. Working for sustained political and cultural change to prioritize public health.

3/22/12

Yale University, New Haven, CT
School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
March 30-31, 2012
The 30th National Pesticide Forum, Healthy Communities: Green solutions for safe environments,
will be held March 30-31, 2012 (Friday evening and all day Saturday) at
Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The
conference will focus on organic landcare, urban/ suburban pesticide
use, organic food, and protective national, state, and local policies.
Registration: Register online.

3/20/12

Chemical Exposures and Obesity and Diabetes

The UK nonprofit organization CHEM
Trust (Chemicals, Health and Environment Monitoring Trust) just released
a report on the links between chemicals and diabetes/obesity. The CHEM
Trust report, entitled Review of the Science Linking Chemical Exposures
to the Human Risk of Obesity and Diabetes, focuses on endocrine
disrupting chemicals in both obesity and diabetes. Exposures to these
chemicals in the womb, at other critical periods of life, and in
adulthood may be linked to obesity and disruption of the normal
functioning of insulin in later life. Evidence of the role of hormone
disrupting chemicals comes from both laboratory studies and studies on
human populations.The report can be found at http://www.chemtrust.org.uk/documents/CHEM%20Trust%20Obesity%20&%20Diabetes%20Full%20Report.pdf

3/16/12

Small
doses can have big health effects. That is a main finding of a new
report, three years in the making, published Wednesday by a team of 12
scientists who study hormone-altering chemicals. Dozens of substances
that can mimic or block hormones are found in the environment, the food
supply and consumer products, including plastics, pesticides and
cosmetics. One of the biggest controversies is whether the tiny doses
that most people are exposed to are harmful. Researchers led by Tufts
University’s Laura Vandenberg concluded after examining hundreds of
studies that health effects “are remarkably common” when people or
animals are exposed to low doses. "Fundamental changes in chemical
testing are needed to protect human health," they wrote.

3/12/12

11th Wege Lecture - Fostering Environments to Sustain Our Children's Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Speaker: Marie Lynn Miranda, Monday, March 26, 2012, 5 p.m., Rackham AuditoriumLecture is followed by question-and-answer session. Public reception follows in the Rackham atrium. Marie Lynn Miranda, dean and professor
at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and
Environment, delivers the 11th Annual Peter M. Wege Lecture on
Sustainability. Her address is titled "Fostering Environments to Sustain
our Children's Health." Miranda became SNRE dean Jan. 1. She also holds
an appointment as professor in the Department of Pediatrics, which is
part of C.S. Mott Children's Hospital.Lecture abstract:Although it is widely agreed that child
health and well-being are determined by multiple forces, surprisingly
little is known about the interactions of those forces. For example,
elevated environmental exposures often occur in communities facing
multiple social stressors like deteriorating housing, inadequate access
to health care, poor schools, high unemployment, high crime, and high
poverty, all of which may compound the effects of environmental
exposures. This phenomenon is especially severe for low income and
minority children. Her talk will focus on how advanced information
technologies can be used to determine the impact of combined social and
environmental stressors on children, and how these same technologies can
and are being used as the basis for deploying interventions that
effectively create more protective environments for children.More information, including location, at http://www.snre.umich.edu/assets/speakers/miranda.html

There is shocking footage of children happily playing about in the wake
of DDT-spraying vehicles trolling the new suburban streets of postwar
America. If it weren’t for work by pioneering environmental activists
like Rachel Carson, such government programs would have left far more
devastating wreckage in their callous path than they did.

It was 50 years ago that Carson first published her seminal treatise Silent Spring,
chronicling how an industrialized society’s broad and indiscriminate
use of chemicals and pesticides can cause irrevocable health and
environmental damage. Such brave work eventually led to lasting changes
in U.S. law, strictly governing the use of such substances. For its
17th-annual symposium, the Wallace Stegner Center will take an in-depth
look at the lasting legacy of both Carson’s work and the environmental
movement that followed in the wake of her eye-opening labors. (Jacob
Stringer)

Silent Spring at 50: The Legacy of Rachel Carson @ Fort Douglas Ballroom, 110 S. Fort Douglas Blvd., 801-585-3440, March 9-10, $100-$175. www.Law.Utah.edu/StegnerDownload the brochure Speakers include: Susan Avery, President and Director, Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution; Terrence Collins, Senior Institute Member,
The Institute for Green Science, Carnegie Mellon University; Robin
Craig, Attorneys’ Title Professor of Law, Associate Dean for
Environmental Programs, and Co-Director of the Environmental and Land
Use Law Program, Florida State University College of Law; Paul Holthus,
founding Executive Director, World Ocean Council; Rowan Jacobsen, author
of Fruitless Fall and other books; Priscilla Murphy, Author of What a
Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring; Naomi
Oreskes, Professor of History and Science Studies, University of
California, San Diego and author of Merchants of Doubt; Sandra
Steingraber, Ecologist and author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s
Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment and other books;
Wendy Wagner, Joe A. Worsham Centennial Professor, School of Law,
University of Texas at Austin, and the production of “Air Tight,” a play
by Aden Ross.

… as we pour our millions into research and invest
all our hopes in vast programs to find cures for established cases of cancer,
we are neglecting the golden opportunity to prevent, even while we seek to
cure….

The task is by no means a hopeless one. In one
important respect the outlook is more encouraging than the situation regarding
infectious disease at the turn of the century. The world was then full of
disease germs, as today it is full of carcinogens. But man did not put the
germs into the environment and his role in spreading them was involuntary. In
contrast, man has put the vast majority of carcinogens into the
environment, and he can, if he wishes, eliminate many of them…

It would be unrealistic to suppose that all chemical
carcinogens can or will be eliminated from the modern world. But a very large
proportion are by no means necessities of life. By their elimination the total
load of carcinogens would be enormously lightened, and the threat that one in
every four will develop cancer would at least be greatly mitigated.

The most determined efforts should be made to
eliminate those carcinogens that now contaminate our food, our water supplies,
and our atmosphere, because they provide the most dangerous type of contact –
minute exposures, repeated over and over through the years…. For those in whom
cancer is already a hidden or a visible presence, efforts to find cures must of
course continue. But for those not yet touched by the disease and certainly for
the generations as yet unborn, prevention is the imperative need.

Why: Connecticut's
landmark law banning the use of toxic pesticides on elementary and
middle school fields in Connecticut is in danger of being eliminated.
Pro-pesticide forces have introduced legislation that would roll back
protections for children's health and once again permit the use of
even the most toxic pesticides on school fields.